Keir Starmer is a couple of years older than me. I grew up with a dad who was a toolmaker and who would never have even accepted promotion to foreman because it would have meant siding with management. My mother was a stay-at-home mam and we grew up with no central heating, with an outside toilet that used to be kept from freezing in winter by a small meths burner lit in the corner under the cistern pipe – and we didn’t have a phone, nor did any of my friends’ families. My parents only got one years after I left home.
Translation: we had it shit when I was a kid, and my dad was either too much of a moaning twat to progress or so tediously up himself he’d rather self-sabotage and have us continue to scrape by than give us a chance of a better life. Because a proper socialist never takes the opportunity to improve things from a position of power, as to do that you have to give up your cushy life of complaining and actually *try* and make things better - and then if you don’t do a decent job you might even have people complain about you, which would be intolerable for anyone incapable of entertaining the idea they might in some way be wrong.
This heady combination of a questionable narrative of being hard done by coupled with boneheaded stubbornness has left me with not so much a chip on my shoulder as an entire tree trunk. And you’d better believe I despise anyone like Starmer who’s made a fucking effort to make things better rather than just doing what they should have - moan about things being shit, and attend protests to listen to others moan. Not like Jeremy Corbyn - now there’s a man who gets it. Or rather, a man who complains people won’t get it for him while he does nothing. That’s proper socialism.